The first from NPR on the rise of suburban, urban and even inner city Future Farmer’s of America chapters around the country:

Unlike FFA members of the past, Melton didn’t grow up on a farm. His parents did. And that’s the norm for the 60 other students in his chapter. “We’re in an urban area, so most of our members do not grow up on property, though they still have that connection to agriculture,” he says.

But because most millennials are several generations removed from the farm, the school district is going to great lengths to make agriculture appeal to more students.

Lauren Hart, the district’s FFA adviser and an agriculture instructor, says in her eight years of teaching, she has noticed a shift. A greater number of students are interested in organic farming methods, grass-fed beef and cage-free eggs. And Hart says she can’t just ignore what students want to learn about. “The interest and the ability both of students going into production agriculture is declining,” she says. “It’s just not something that a high school student either wants to or believes they can get into.” That’s why Hart reaches into areas you wouldn’t typically associate with farming — law, public policy, entrepreneurship and bookkeeping. And that’s something that doesn’t always sit well with a few students’ parents who hail from farm country.

They say, ” ‘When are you going to have my student on a tractor?’ ” Hart says. “Well, never.”

The second from Kristen Schmidt who uses her transition from the corporate world to sustainable agriculture to talk about how people can put a business background to work in sustainable agriculture and/or food advocacy:

Currently, sustainable agriculture jobs – and green jobs in general – are driving the U.S. economy. According to a recent report released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, green jobs are quickly becoming one of the fastest growing employment sectors within the country and an article in the LA Times notes that the increase in green jobs crosses industries, stretching from manufacturing to education to compliance. While people often think of beekeeping, dairy farming or urban gardening when they think of sustainable agriculture jobs, there’s also a major need for traditional skills within this non-traditional environment. For example, a food advocacy organization is hiring a communications manager, a large organic yogurt company is seeking a farmer relationship manager, another organization is looking for a director of educational programs, and a large publishing company is hiring a managing editor for its agricultural sector (all jobs that are currently accepting applications as of the publication of this article).

There is a lot of great stuff going on out there, a little business skill and sense would be a welcome addition to more than a few operations.

This post from Nate Silver’s new Five Thirty Eight caught me eye. Researchers observed that many cartoon characters appearing on cereal boxes are looking down, which means they could be trying to make eye contact with kids. Could this matter?

Of the 86 characters that appeared on 65 boxes, the researchers noted that 57 were looking downward (they found that these cereals tended to be placed on middle shelves. So looking downward means looking at children).

Then, the researchers tested whether eye contact increased positive feelings toward the brand. They digitally altered a box of Trix and asked 63 university students to rate it

When the researchers compared the responses against control cereal boxes on which characters weren’t looking downward, they found that eye contact increased attention to, trust in and connection with the brand. When participants were asked to choose between Trix and Fruity Pebbles, they were more likely to choose Trix when the character on the box, a rabbit, was looking down at them.

To get a first hand feel for this creepy phenomenon, I hoofed it over to my local Fred Meyer to browse the cereal aisle, a place I’ve only stopped in once before to grab some store brand bran flakes for homemade muesli. The first thing walking into that aisle made me realize was how many SINKs and DINKs live in my neighborhood. There just wasn’t the expected endless, piebald wall of technicolor leprechauns, toucans and hyper-kinetic rabbits. They were there, but here’s the funny thing. They were relegated to the bottom shelves. And here’s the creepy thing. They were looking up at me, trying to make eye contact from the place on the floor.

Apparently the the rabbit and the leprechaun have a back up plan for stores where their corporate overlords aren’t willing to pay top dollar for slotting fees. My guess is that the manufacturers have different boxes depending on what slots they are paying for.

But Adrian Peterson didn’t need to TRY to make eye contact, I had to TRY to avoid it.

At 5′ 9″, I am apparently the exact height of a prospective Wheaties customer.

The Lords of Cereal are not playing around. Especially when it comes to hunting kids through marketing. Here’s Marion Nestle summarizing the findings of a major literature review conducted by the Institute of Medicine in 2006:

The IOM analyzes the results of 123 published, peer-reviewed studies addressing links between food marketing and children’s preferences, requests, consumption, and adiposity. Despite Talmudic parsing of the limitations of the research, the IOM finds that the preponderance of evidence supports the links. Marketing strongly influences children’s food preferences, requests, and consumption. The idea that some forms of marketing increase the risk of obesity, says the IOM, “cannot be rejected.”

The IOM conducted its study under a considerable handicap. Companies would not provide proprietary information, because the IOM is required to make public all documents it uses. The report reveals why companies insist on keeping such research private. It lists numerous firms that conduct marketing research focused even on preschool children, using methods — photography, ethnography, focus groups — in an Orwellian-sounding fashion to elucidate the psychological underpinnings of children’s food choices, “kid archetypes,” the “psyche of mothers as the family gatekeeper,” and “parent–child dyads of information.” As the IOM documents, this enterprise is breathtaking in its comprehensive and unabashed effort to provide a research basis for exploiting the suggestibility of young children. Although marketers justify appeals to children as “training” in consumer culture, as free speech, and as good for business, they are not selling just any consumer product: they are selling junk foods to children who would be better off not eating them.

. . . Marketing to children is hardly new, but recent methods are far more intense and pervasive. Television still predominates, but the balance is shifting to product placements in toys, games, educational materials, songs, and movies; character licensing and celebrity endorsements; and less visible “stealth” campaigns involving word of mouth, cellular-telephone text messages, and the Internet. All aim to teach children to recognize brands and pester their parents to buy them. The IOM notes that by two years of age, most children can recognize products in supermarkets and ask for them by name.

But the most insidious purpose of marketing is to persuade children to eat foods made “just for them” — not what adults are eating. Some campaigns aim to convince children that they know more about what they are “supposed to” eat than their parents do. Marketers explicitly attempt to undermine family decisions about food choices by convincing children that they, not adults, should control those choices.4 Indeed, children now routinely report that they, and not their parents, decide what to eat.

A new study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, now shows just how powerful that advertising and branding can be. Researchers showed children stills from fast food commercials and asked them to name the various foods in the frame. Only 10% of the kids correctly identified Burger King’s apple slices, packaged liked french fries, while the majority confused them for french fries. Around one-half to one-third of the kids in the study couldn’t correctly identify milk in McDonald’s and Burger King children ads.

The other subset that calls for a closer look is pester power. That is the idea that, although kids aren’t the decision makers as consumers, they can be convinced and motivated to nag their parents into making purchases that the parents would prefer not to make. People of a libertarian bent, who would be quick to dismiss the legitimacy of lending policy weight to this idea need to understand the emerging consensus that willpower is, in important ways, a finite resource that can be exhausted. Kids are diabolically savvy about exhausting that resource, even as they are less savvy about the marketers manipulating them.

First lady Michelle Obama stepped up the pressure Tuesday against companies selling junk food to students, announcing a new government proposal that would ban advertising of sodas and unhealthy snacks in public schools.

The new USDA rules would phase out the advertising of sugary drinks and junk foods on vending machines and around campuses during the school day and set guidelines for other in-school promotions, from banners hung in hallways to sponsored scoreboards on school football fields.

I have to give Michelle Obama credit. While each piece of her Let’s Move campaign has been an underwhelming compromised step forward, they are slowly, but surely starting to add up to something substantial when taken as a whole.

Getting a handle on marketing and competitive schools is a no brainer, since there are no difficult legal, philosophical or public health questions to be addressed; only interest group politics. That means if we want better compromises, we need a stronger public health constituency.

“I’m here today with one simple request– and that is to do even more and move even faster to market responsibly to our kids,” Mrs. Obama said.

Speaking from beneath the historic portrait of Lincoln in the packed State Dining Room, Mrs. Obama laid out her vision for continuing the “cultural shift” toward healthier eating she said is already underway thanks to her Let’s Move! campaign.

More than 100 guests attended the event, billed by the White House as the first of its kind at 1600 Penn. They included representatives from food, beverage and media giants, as well as academic experts, parent leaders and public health advocates.

I am sitting talking to Sean, a 17-year-old working-class kid from Handsworth, a notoriously tough area of Birmingham in the UK’s Midlands. His speech is strangely inarticulate and slurred, his accent heavy and laced with slang—original Jamaican patois mixed with English street. I have family from Birmingham and know the nasal dialect,but even I am struggling to understand and keep up.

What I do understand is that Sean is hiding something. He has a condition known as Phenylketonuria, a serious metabolic disorder that we are studying for a client of ours. They manufacture a food supplement which helps moderate the effects. PKU, as it is known, is an inability for the human body to process any form of complex protein, meaning that the sufferer is resigned to a life of bland, low-protein food: no red meat, chicken, cheese, nuts, or legumes. Staples such as bread, pasta and rice have to be carefully monitored. Most are simply impossible to digest.

A meat inspection program that the Agriculture Department plans to roll out in pork plants nationwide has repeatedly failed to stop the production of contaminated meat at American and foreign plants that have already adopted the approach, documents and interviews show.

The program allows meat producers to increase the speed of processing lines by as much as 20 percent and cuts the number of USDA safety inspectors at each plant in half, replacing them with private inspectors employed by meat companies. The approach has been used for more than a decade by five American hog plants under a pilot program.

But three of these plants were among the 10 worst offenders in the country for health and safety violations, with serious lapses that included failing to remove fecal matter from meat, according to a report this spring by the USDA inspector general. The plant with the worst record by far was one of the five in the pilot program.

n the quirky little college town of Yellow Springs, Ohio, home to many unconventional ideas over the years, there’s now a small insect factory.

It’s an unassuming operation, a generic boxy building in a small industrial park. It took me a while even to find a sign with the company’s name: . But its goal is grand: The people at EnviroFlight are hoping that their insects will help our planet grow more food while conserving land and water.

They don’t expect you to eat insects. (Sure, Asians and Africans do it, but Americans are finicky.) The idea is, farmed insects will become food for fish or pigs.

In a move decried by consumer and environmental groups as severely weakening the meaning of the organic label, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced this week that the agency had changed the process for exempting otherwise prohibited substances (such as synthetics) in food that carries the “organic” or “made with organic” label. No public comment period was provided for the changes to this policy, which had been in place since 2005.

Under the federal organic law[1] and prior to Friday’s announcement, there was a controlled process for allowing the use of substances not normally permitted in organic production because of extenuating circumstances. These exemptions were supposed to be made for a five-year period, in order to encourage the development of natural (or organic) alternatives. The exemptions were required by law to expire, known as “sunset,” unless they were reinstated by a two-thirds “decisive” majority vote of the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) and include a public review. This is no longer the case.

Dirt in two fields around Alton where biotech corn was being grown was hard and compact. Prying corn stalks from the soil with a shovel was difficult, and when the plants finally came up, their roots were trapped in a chunk of dirt. Once freed, the roots spread out flat like a fan and were studded with only a few nodules, which are critical to the exchange of nutrients.

In comparison, conventional corn in adjacent fields could be tugged from the ground by hand, and dirt with the consistency of wet coffee grounds fell off the corn plants’ knobby roots.

“Because glyphosate moves into the soil from the plant, it seems to affect the rhizosphere, the ecology around the root zone, which in turn can affect plant health,” said Robert Kremer, a scientist at the United States Agriculture Department, who has studied the impact of glyphosate on soybeans for more than a decade and has warned of the herbicide’s impact on soil health.

Here’s some food for thought: One-third of the world’s food goes to waste every year. In the U.S., about 40 percent of our food gets thrown out. It’s happening on the farm, at the grocery store and in our own homes.

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about what to do about it — from that’s past its prime to getting restaurants to .

, the former president of Trader Joe’s, is determined to repurpose the perfectly edible produce slightly past its sell-by date that ends up in the trash. (That happens in part because people misinterpret the labels, according to a out this week from Harvard and the National Resources Defense Council.) To tackle the problem, Rauch is opening a new market early next year in Dorchester, Mass., that will prepare and repackage the food at deeply discounted prices.